A federal judge issues an order for the president/executive branch to halt an activity he or she deems unconstitutional or at least problematic enough for additional hearings and review.
The president does not comply with the order, and sends government attorneys into court to offer various rationales for that non-compliance. The rationales strike the judge and many legal observers from both right- and left-wing orientations as evasive and even frivolous.
The judge, seemingly exasperated, orders compliance and sets a hearing date for the government to provide vital information that is at issue in the case, with the implicit possibility of issuing contempt citations that may entail confinement and/or fines if his orders are not followed.
The non-compliance and withholding of the vital information the judge seeks continues, with government attorneys trooping into court on the scheduled hearing date and telling the judge his orders are “beating a dead horse.”
The judge gives the attorneys one more day to produce the information.
(This is where we currently are on Wednesday afternoon in the case of deported Venezuelan migrants the administration claims are criminal gang members, though they have thus far refused to provide the judge with evidence to support that claim. Notable: various media reports have cast great suspicion on the claim that all of the 138 deportees are gang members or involved in criminal activity at all. The detainees were flown to the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center prison in El Salvador last weekend, in defiance of the judge’s direct orders and without the legally required due process.)
So: tomorrow comes.
The president, itching to subdue the judge as a constraint on the veritable tsunami of executive orders he has been issuing that bypass the legislative and judicial branches of government, remains defiant and instructs his attorneys to skip the court date, or simply continue to withhold the required information .
The judge issues a contempt-of-court citation and orders the attorneys to report to jail within 24 hours.
The president summons the attorneys to the White House—and tells them to pack extra clothes.
When warrant-toting federal marshals are apprised of the attorneys’ whereabouts, they seek entry to the White House grounds—and are denied.
What happens now?
Happy Thursday.
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Test. (Yes, Comments are active and welcome again, praise be to the tech gods…)
I wrote this some time ago….
This is a wonderful story of two dear friends, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia. Both grew up in New York City. Both studied law at Harvard. Before becoming Supreme Court justices, both were professors at prestigious law schools. For several years, they even served together on United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Both enjoyed loving 56-year marriages. Despite all these commonalities, they interpreted the Constitution from radically different positions. However, far more importantly, they never allowed it to interfere in their beloved friendship.
When President Bill Clinton struggled over his first nomination to the Supreme Court, Justice Antonin Scalia was asked, “If you were stranded on a desert island with your new court colleague, who would you prefer: Larry Tribe or Mario Cuomo?” Justice Scalia unhesitatingly answered, “Ruth Bader Ginsburg.”
Following the Supreme Court’s decision to rule in favor of George W. Bush against respondent Al Gore, a decision that determined the Presidency, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, one of the three dissenting justices, remained in her office long after the other justices had gone home. She recalled that around 9 p.m., her phone rang; it was Antonin Scalia. She clearly remembered the conversation. “He didn’t say, ‘Get over it’.” Instead, he fondly advised, “Ruth, why are you still at the court? Go home and take a hot bath.” She wisely took his suggestion.
Ginsburg and Scalia, whom she adoringly called Nino, often accompanied each other to the Kennedy Center to share a common love–the opera. In Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, they appeared as extras. In the opera Scalia/Ginsburg, composer Derrick Wang wove threads of Verdi and Puccini arias, the National Anthem, Noels, jazz, and gospel into a comical quilt of sparring constitutional ideologies. Shortly after Scalia’s death, Ginsburg revealed that her ever-bombastic friend considered his Opera Ball evening playing the piano for two tenors as the highlight of his years in Washington. Maureen and Antonin Scalia and Ruth and Marty Ginsburg got together every New Year’s Eve in a “Scalia kills it and Marty cooks it” celebration.
They frequently vacationed together. Scalia’s favorite souvenir shopping pal was Ginsburg. In India one year, a photograph of them sitting atop a “magnificent, very elegant” elephant went viral. A few years later, during a Ginsburg-Scalia symposium at George Washington University, she recounted the event to the delight of Scalia. Her feminist friends asked, “Ruth, why are you sitting in the back?” She answered. “It was simply a matter of proper weight distribution.” Scalia couldn’t stop laughing.
Scalia once dryly remarked, “Call us the odd couple. She likes opera, and she’s a very nice person. What’s not to like? Except her views on law.” In 2010, when Chief Justice Roberts announced that Marty Ginsburg had just died, Scalia was seen wiping tears from his eyes. In 2016, Antonin Scalia died, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg delivered an emotional eulogy. She called him, “a magnificent performer. How blessed I was to have a working colleague and dear friend of such captivating brilliance, high spirits, and quick wit….We were different, yes, in our interpretation of written texts, yet one in our reverence for the Court and its place in the U.S. system of governance.”